SAFETY IN NUMBERS
How might we examine moments of safety around us to create a collective action for shared wellbeing?
The Challenge
You’re walking down the sidewalk, lights are dim, streets are kind of empty. It’s 2AM. And You’re just leaving your friend’s house. You take a shortcut to cut the time home, but you have to cut across an alley. As you’re rounding the corner out onto the next street, you hear something unusual stir nearby and your heart races. On high alert, you flip your head around but something slips quickly out of sight. Across the street you’re startled by two women, giggling at some inside joke.
Your adrenaline is spiking, and you pick up the pace. A flickering street light is not helping.
It flickers with your audible heartbeat.
Feeling all too much like a prey circled by an unknown predator, you think about all the ways animals survive these threats in nature. Meerkats collect in packs, stand upright and puff their fur to appear larger than life. Zebras travel in herds and their striped patterns make them much harder to single out. Schools of fish move about in well-coordinated unison to dilute their chances of individual capture. Pack animals are much harder to attack when they outnumber their threat. Where are your people, your crew, to collectively create protective cover and ward off potential danger?
Bright and bold
You let yourself be quietly seen, and form a network of softly glowing stars with everyone within a short distance radius as beacons of safe haven. The collective’s phones buzz and you’re directed down a path nearer to others. A crowd of shining, bold, and growing bodies begins to form as you collectively walk the streets together with your anonymous allies and champions. Like a school of fish, you navigate your way home confidently together.
This collective
is part of a network of people wearing one of SafeWear’s jumpsuits or jackets. These fashionable pieces provide a sense of safety by reacting, signaling, and herding people together. Beautifully designed to glow, puff, or blend in, the pieces are built with embedded technology, smart fabric, and a companion phone application, such that the jumpsuit or jacket can “listen” for danger — whether it be screams, threats, crying, biometric reactions of the wearer to fear and distress or even sudden deviations from intended destinations.
When danger is “sensed”
The clothing activates in response, with prey-inspired abilities that have evolved as natural forms of protection. The Safewear companion app communicates this danger to allies and authorities nearby by emitting and receives signals, like warnings, activating other Saferwear-ers, and redirecting their routes towards each other, thus providing “safety in numbers”.
While creating safety for yourself, you are also looking out for your community. When you signup for Safewear, you elect to be part of this new citizen neighborhood watch — but why not look good while you’re at it?
User Experience
1.SIGNING UP TO PROTECT YOUR PEOPLE
Safewear recruits local community to look out for each other. You can sign up for safewear online, and after a background check and short review process, you are allowed to purchase one of the beautiful jumpsuits or jackets to wear on a night out. Or just to walk around as a Safewear night watch, herding others to safety.
2.DETECTING DANGER
With embedded sensors and smart fabric, and a companion app, the Safewear system listens and understands sounds and language (e.g. screams, statements of fear, doubt, threats, crying). It can also read fear and distress biometrics of the wearer (against their baseline). It checks for sudden and unexpected changes in light, speed, or deviations from intended destinations.
3.COMMUNICATING DANGER
When danger is sensed, the Safewear suit glows, puffs, and changes shape and coloring in an attempt towards off threats, light-dark pathways, and help you find others. The companion app sends digital signals to other wearers as a warning of nearby danger or harm and alerts any patrolling law enforcement nearby.
4.DIRECTING TO SAFETY
Safewear acts like a school of fish, redirecting phone maps and directions to draw Safewear-ers towards each other for and away from danger on similar routes.
Make it your own!
#PalmwoodAsks_Safety
Share your Voice. What has been inspiring you to look at safety differently lately?
THE LAST TIME I FELT unsafe was ________because___________
How might we take steps to better ensure the emotional, social, spiritual, and physical safety of ourselves and others?
Yellow is an invitation to conversation. A call for those who lead with questions, for the ones that ask for more, and for those who aren’t afraid to wonder.
Continue the conversation at @_palmwood_
THE LAST TIME I FELT TRULY
safe was ________because___________
How might we take steps to better ensure the emotional, social, spiritual, and physical safety of ourselves and others?
Yellow is an invitation to conversation. A call for those who lead with questions, for the ones that ask for more, and for those who aren’t afraid to wonder.
Continue the conversation at @_palmwood_
